The Yearbook

Copyright © 2015 by Carol Masciola

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

Merit Press

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

www.meritpressbooks.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-8897-X

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8897-6

eISBN 10: 1-4405-8898-8

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8898-3

10987654321

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

Cover design by Christina Riddle and Frank Rivera.

Cover image ©hello-tuesday.deviantart.com.

To Ibon, Endika, and Leonardo

Special thanks to my editor, Jacquelyn Mitchard, to my agents Jacqueline Flynn and Joelle Delbourgo and their intern Sammy Brown, to Christina Riddle of Edgewater Graphics for her cover and to Frank Rivera for his contributions to the design, to Katie McDonough for her careful copyediting, and to Claudia Schou of the Media Boutique in Long Beach, California, for advising me on my book query.

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• One
  
• Two
  
• Three
  
• Four
  
• Five
  
• Six
  
• Seven
  
• Eight
  
• Nine
  
• Ten
  
• Eleven
  
• Twelve
  
• Thirteen
  
• Fourteen
  
• Fifteen
  
• Sixteen
  
• Seventeen
  
• Eighteen
  
• Nineteen
  
• Twenty
  
• Twenty-One
  
• Twenty-Two
  
• Twenty-Three
  
• Twenty-Four
  
• Twenty-Five
  
• Twenty-Six
  
• Twenty-Seven
  
• Epilogue
  

Lola glanced over her shoulder. The man in the turtleneck sweater was still following her. She didn't know who he was or what he wanted, but there was no doubt he had called her name and chased her when she fled.

She turned down the east corridor and ran for the restroom. An
OUT OF ORDER
sign was taped over the
GIRLS
sign. She kicked the locked door and looked around for another hiding place. In a few long strides she was inside the library, the door hissing shut behind her.

“You're late,” said a voice, and a husky woman in a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt and Lycra jeans emerged from behind a bookshelf. She frowned at her wristwatch. “Or else you're early. Anyhow, you're not on time.”

“For what?” Lola said.

“Aren't you my little helper from the detention hall?”

Lola thought of the man in the turtleneck. He didn't look like campus security. Probation, maybe? Social Services? By now he was probably lurking just outside the library door, trying to pick up her trail. “Yeah. I guess I'm the helper,” she said.

“Good. Come with me. We had a little incident that requires some janitorial activity.”

The woman moved into the stacks and Lola followed. She had been in the library a few times but had never noticed the low door at the back of the room. She was glad to see the work would take place out of plain view. The woman turned a rusty key in the lock and the door groaned open.

“Here's the reserve room. Or, as I've come to think of it,
the refuse room
.” She snorted at her own joke.

Lola looked around. It was one of the most impressive messes she'd ever seen, and as a part-time employee of an unsanitary chicken restaurant, she'd seen plenty. The tiny room was scorched but also soggy, as if it had been both set on fire and flooded. Books and parts of books were strewn about like the debris that washes up on the beach after a storm.

“How did
this
happen?” she asked.

“It caught fire, then the sprinklers came on.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“Just start chucking everything into that garbage bin. If you want I can try to get you the snow shovel, but it might take a while. I gotta fill out a form.”

The woman handed Lola a pair of rubber gloves and turned back in the direction of her desk. Lola inspected the shelves. They were jam-packed and sour with mildew. She climbed onto a table and opened the window. The morning drizzle had stopped, and a breeze entered on a shaft of sunlight. That was better. Lola jumped back down and called out the door, “Hello? Library lady?”

“Mrs. Dubois. Whaddaya want?”

“I'll need a stool to reach those top shelves, or a ladder, even.”

“Forget it,” Mrs. Dubois yelled back. “Safety regulations don't allow students to be climbing up on ladders and breaking their necks. Just stand on that table. But it wobbles. Don't break your neck. And shut the door. That stink is killing me.”

Lola shut the door. The odor was tolerable now with the window open. She took off her knapsack and placed it on the table, angling it to cover the spot where someone had scratched
YOU SUCK
into the Formica. She snapped on the gloves.

Most of the books on the lower shelves were beyond saving, and beyond Lola: heavy volumes full of chemical symbols that fell to pieces at her touch, leather-bound sets on local history, now bloated and squishy. Lola tossed
The Natural History of Ashfield County, Ohio, Through 1900
into the bin, thinking how it had lasted so long only to meet the same fate as today's banana peels and pencil shavings and snotty Kleenexes. She skimmed the sticky pages of
The Temperance Lesson Book: Short Lessons on Alcohol and Its Action on the Body
,
1878 edition, and sent it flapping after its ill-fated predecessors. She was about to do likewise to
Stories of Ohio
, by a certain William Dean Howells, when, before she knew it, she was on page 36:

In his old age Logan wandered from place to place, broken by the misfortunes of his people, and homeless in his own land. He fell prey to drink, and was at last murdered near Detroit, where, as the story goes, he was sitting by his campfire, and lost in gloomy thought, when an Indian whom he had offended stole upon him and sank his tomahawk in
to
—

“What are you doing?” It was Mrs. Dubois, evidently back from lunch, filling the doorway.

“Reading,” Lola said.

“Don't read. Throw.”

Lola sat up and stretched. “How'd this fire start?”

Mrs. Dubois picked thoughtfully at the space between her front teeth with a bejeweled thumbnail. “It's the damnedest thing. They don't know. The fire people, they've been all over it with their detective kit. Just poof. It was on fire.”

Mrs. Dubois left at two o'clock, threatening to return in an hour to check Lola's progress, but she didn't come back. Without anyone to tell her not to read the doomed books, she sat down on the squeaky folding chair next to the table and continued as the light from the window faded. Other notable books came and went. There were covers without pages, and pages without covers.
The
Ashfield County Herbarium
had shed its pressed bluebells and wood lilies and expired in the muck. Lola wondered if any of the seeds would sprout in the dump, and then if anybody would pick the flowers and press them in a book, and then if the book would end up in a flooded library, and then—she realized she was hungry. She launched
The Ashfield County Herbarium
toward the bin and went prowling for food.

She bought a bag of Doritos from the snack machine next to the gym, noticing with irritation that they were expired, and climbed into a far corner of the bleachers to eat them. Down below, a bunch of student council doofs were decorating the place for that night's dance. They'd managed to get the disco ball to rotate, but feedback from the speakers could have withered eardrums halfway down the block. Lola followed the rotations of the disco ball, and her mind began to wander. She was thinking how strange it was to be back in Ashfield. She had been away ten years, not far away, still in the same county, but during all that time Ashfield had been like a hazy dream place to her, not a real place you could get to in a car. Yet here she was. Lots of people still recognized her name, and remembered certain things about her that she wished they didn't.

Lola had gone to several schools and had not done well at any of them. The last had expelled her for chronic truancy and poor academic performance. She had been failing every class. Mrs. Hershey, Lola's social worker, had talked to her in a new, ominous way that made her hide under the bedcovers. Most of the speech was forgotten, locked away in the vault of unbearable things, but a few choice lines still rang in Lola's ears, especially at night:
You have to pass these classes. What will you do in life without a high school diploma? It's almost too late.

The memory intruded now, and she took off her lucky baseball cap and swatted at the air, as if the words were swarming around her head. She knew it was a funny, not-quite-right thing to do, but it made her feel better. She was still swatting when she noticed half a dozen cheerleaders watching her from the gym floor. One of them whispered something to the others, and then Lola saw them snicker.

“What's funny, morons?” she called down, which startled them nicely. She hated to be noticed, to be observed. It was all right if it was only the other freaks from the group home looking. But the stares of regular kids, normal kids, seemed to shrink her, to make her feel like something you'd step over on the street.

She stomped down the bleachers and back toward the cozy safety of the library. She knew she was expected at the group home for dinner. She hadn't asked for a pass. But she pushed that thought from her mind, back into the crawlspace with her stacks of unfinished homework, the snickers in the gym, the stranger in the turtleneck sweater.

The reserve room was dark now. She snapped on the lights and a fluorescent tube flickered on overhead, lending a sickly yellow-green glow to the disaster area. She climbed up onto the tricky table again and examined one of the high shelves. With a screech, the solid place where she had been leaning her left hand gave way like a door opening up, revealing a dark nook in the shelf. Lola peeked into the space, fearing spiders or a mouse skeleton, and after a moment worked up the courage to put her hand inside and feel around. She pulled out a Mercury head dime dated 1920, an old pack of matches, an empty glass bottle, and a yellowed business card. Lola read the card:
Downing's Millinery Shop: Evening and Daywear for Fashionable Ladies and Girls, 2112 Main Street, Ashfield
. She pocketed the dime and the business card, making a mental note to look up
millinery
in the dictionary someday, and tossed the rest into the trash. Then she wiped off her dusty hands on her jeans and began to clear the next shelf.

Taking out the first few books, she found another row hidden behind, perfectly dry. Like gallant soldiers, the books in the first rank had sacrificed themselves to save those in the second. Lola pulled out the first dry book she touched;
ASHFIELD HIGH: 1924
, it said. It was an old yearbook.

Lola jumped off the table and sat down to leaf through it. The brittle pages gave off a pleasant smell, like smoky acorns. Near the front was a full-page picture of Ashfield High School. Could this be the same ratty building in which she now sat? Yes, the front was recognizable, with its pillars and gargoyles. Clean and new, without the graffiti, Ashfield High looked to Lola like a courthouse or a museum. The shabby portable classrooms that leeched onto both wings were missing. The school sat on a wide lawn instead of its sheet of cracked and weedy cement. The mermaid fountain looked new and pretty. Lola wondered when the poor mermaid had been decapitated, and by what idiot.